Every Page Duplicated Once

One Plain, One + Ads

[rharri]

I'm planning a site that will describe "doohickeys" (a new gadget likely to make widgets obsolete). There are hundreds of different doohickeys made in different ways and doohickey makers are anxious to advertise the virtues of their particular doohickey on the site. But, I think, many readers would like ad-free pages. So, I plan to make two pages decribing each doohickey - one with and one without ads. Since Google ignores images, it will see several hundred duplicate pages. Will the duplication be a punishable offense? Can I avoid this potential problem by making one set of pages dynamic (*.jsp) and banning the extension? Nothing that I've found searching for "duplicate content" or "duplicate pages" quite fits this scenario.

Bob

[Marketing Guy]

Presumably users will pay for ad-removal?

If so, then put all ad-free pages in a folder and setup your robots.txt file to disallow from that folder.

That way SE's dont see dup content and any surfers arrving will be taking to pages with ads on them.

Scott

[madweb]

Hello Mr Rharri,

One option would be to put a meta tag for robots on one version instructing them not to index that page - as per the googlebot guidleines thus:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex">

Googlebot will retrieve the document, but it will not index the document.

[google.com...]

Perhaps other webmasterworld members could comment?

[rharri]

Thanks, both suggestions are very helpful.

"Presumably users will pay for ad-removal? " - yeah, I know it sounds a little crazy but may make sense in this context.

Thanks again.

bob

[Marketing Guy]

Ah it doesnt sound crazy! :)

Ive seen it used in a lot of sites.

I just wasn't sure if you were planning something else or not! :)

Scott

[brotherhood of LAN]

I've been in a similar situ, though not for ads, but a session and a login box.

If the person is not logged in, display the login box, if they are logged in a session is registered, don't display the box and display their shopping cart. I guess you can do the same with ads without making extra pages.

You could use a scripting language to decide if a visitor see's the advertisement or not, and save you the trouble of making new pages.

I'm sure if all your pages have lots of good info about doohickeys you won't have to worry about dupe pages ;)

[dwilson]

You could use a scripting language to decide if a visitor see's the advertisement or not, and save you the trouble of making new pages.

DEFINITELY the way to go unless there's some really good reason not to. It also eliminates the "duplicate" issue, as Google will not have paid for ad removal.

This is one that would tempt me to show UA googlebot the ad-free side ... since that is available ... but that's probably going over to the dark side.

[brotherhood of LAN]

>>>but that's probably going over to the dark side

Oh, I'm sure there is darker dwilson ;), you're probably doing them a favour and saving them bandwidth.....